Quoting: EhvisI my experience, the improvement is much better in bad areas. In line with the Tyrant's Lash benchmark. So the improvement is really noticeable where it counts.

Yes this is what we'd expect the largest boosts come when previously the GPU was starved due to GL driver overhead using all the CPU time.

Vulkan has a much lower overhead which means in these high stress areas you can now utilise much more (usually 100%) of your GPU. The less powerful the CPU and the more powerful the GPU the greater the effect Vulkan can have.

This means you'll be a bit faster in most areas but the areas that really dipped down due to drivers should now only drop a small amount giving you a much nicer experience.

That said this is still a beta (and so are some of the drivers) so expect a few rough edges. That's why we released the beta and asked for feedback.

Thanks to everyone who's emailed in so far!

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Quoting: SkiskiI just tried and there seems to be a little less stuttering, but the fps keep going under 20.
I'll try a little more and maybe I'll write to feral support.
Just to sum up my specs:
i5 2400, nvidia GTX 960 with nvidia drivers 375.26, 8 Go of RAM.
At "normal" settings, I get something between 10 and 30 fps...

That sounds like something is very wrong on your machine. :-( Please remember to send a support report from the pre game launcher as that will help us look into your exact hardware and driver info.

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Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: edddeduck_feral<...awesome reply as always...>

It's so great to have you amongst us here, Edddeduck. Thanks for the explanation, detailed enough to really explain things without getting too detailed for only the high end techies to understand. :)

Thanks again!

You're welcome

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: aejsmithYep, you'll need Mesa git. Both us and the radv developers have done quite a few fixes over the last few weeks to get the game running well.

Did the game wait for Ubuntu to offer easy access to new Mesa versions?

The two things aren't linked. The easier access to Mesa is for the offical released versions of Mesa.

Mad Max is pretty cutting edge in terms of radv/anv support so needs the latest git build (as of today) to run correctly. :)

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Quoting: sigzdoesn't perform very well at all on a 770gtx with latest drivers (378.13), worst experience than opengl, framerate is really unstable and low.

That is very strange sounds like you have a specific issue. Do make sure you leave feedback vulkanfeedback [at] feralinteractive.com so we can make fixes and/or report driver issues back to the driver teams.

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Quoting: SkiskiI just tried the game last week and my CPU (i5-2400 3.1GHz) can't handle the game. It was between 10 and 30 FPS. Could vulkan help the CPU and use more the GPU? Because my GTX 960 is more than enough for this game.

The game was mainly CPU bound so it should help but your issue sounds like you had something wrong with the drivers causing that performance drop as you're easily within spec for the GL version and should have much much higher performance.

We've seen performance drops reported by a few unlucky people on GL using 375.39 or newer but not with 367.57 so perhaps that's your old problem. That said I'd certainly give the Vulkan version a try as it might avoid the driver bug as you'll be on Vulkan not OpenGL. Please do send feedback to the Feral feedback email.

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Quoting: aldyHow is the performance near Gastown? This was the most demanding area in the OpenGL version.

Quoting: BeamboomOk, wow. I am blown away by the difference. And this is no demo but a real world example. Utterly promising.

Please Feral dude, stop by and explain to us why exactly the difference is this major, even on a ported title?

For the most part Mad Max on GL is CPU bound - ie. limited by the single threaded CPU performance on the GL thread. We already use a separate thread for GL dispatch but this doesn’t mean GL itself is multithreaded.

Vulkan helps us massively here, as you can see in the graphs, and is almost always GPU bound now. If you've got the time to spec this out you could look into average GPU utilisation (using nvidia-smi) with GL and with Vulkan, and you'll see the difference.

To be clear the benchmark areas are some of the absolute *worst* cases for the CPU, designed that way so we could target the issue directly. That obviously produces some skewed results towards the best case for Vulkan, but I'd hope the jump in performance across the board proves it's not just a one off.

Other games might not get as large a boost, the exact benefits very much depend on if the game is CPU or GPU bound and why.

Quoting: elmapulwait, this is a linux only feature or windows is supported?

Linux only.

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Quoting: neowiz73I really appreciate the work Feral have been doing, they have become a great addition to gaming on Linux as a whole. I hope they continue to do such great work which will help give Linux some sort of standards as far as the gaming community goes. this will undoubtedly become a huge help for all distros that want to support the gaming side of Linux.

Wow thanks!

Quoting: neowiz73it looks like MESA could use a new feature for an on-disk-shader-cache :)

That's already in progress and in testing for Mesa 17.1 - https://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=e3a01a5d1b019e7b00218ba526874f4c77ea8bee [External Link]

Liam reported on this here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/the-mesa-glsl-shader-cache-is-now-enabled-by-default.9241

\o/

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Quoting: miboThank you all for the interview, even though I'm now a bit disappointed.
I followed the Feral link for the Games <-> MESA state table.
DeusEx is listed there as "Not supported due to known issues" :-(
What are those issues?

The Mesa FAQ is a general list of overall status we don't want to try and track every possible issue that's what the Mesa bug tracker is for. In the case of Deus Ex the lack of an on disk shader cache is a key feature as without it the game has huge loading times every time you start the game, we can't have that type of experience on an officially supported title. There are also some other performance issues although many of these have now been resolved.

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Quoting: miroI am a little concerned about that, and I am not talking about deus ex itself, but about the fact that this DLC needed a "port" at all, or even additional work by feral.

When a game adds in new levels and features you need to update the game. If it's updated then we'll need to update it on Linux too. In some cases a platform specific issue can cause a slight delay but they are usually small for games that are released at the same time.

Quoting: miroalso, since we are with the same publisher:
https://hitman.com/en-us/news/march-update-release-notes# [External Link]
it says:The HITMAN March Update releases worldwide across PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows PC on March 14th 2017.
this also applies for previous updates (they release updates every 4 weeks). honestly, I have no idea how old my copy of hitman is in steamOS.

HITMAN has been updated every few weeks since we shipped on Linux and every single release and Elusive Target has been released at EXACTLY the same time on Linux as Windows. This has been publicised by Feral, most Linux gaming sites and the Release notes on Steam [External Link] as well as the fact your Linux app has updated. :-)

Quoting: miroso what does this mean? that feral has work to do again, just for us to have the latest content/updates available?

That's how different platforms work, if an application is updated you need to move the code and data changes over. Some items and challenges are server side(so no new binary's needed on any platform) but things like Elusive Targets can also include a new binary with other bug fixes.

Quoting: miromakes me feel like a sad 2nd class gamer again. all major platforms are supported here in that statement, linux is not, so ...well. not major, okay, but kinda abandoned.

This seems a little exaggerated :( The game has same time updates & features plus full cross platform support from both the Linux and Windows developers to keep things coordinated. I'd call that major level of coordination and support which is the exact opposite of abandoned. :)

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